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Transcendent Topologies Transcendent Topologies: Structuralism and Visual Writing tom hibbard LUNA BISONTE PRODS 2018 TRANSCENDENT TOPOLOGIES: STRUCTURALISM AND VISUAL WRITING © Tom Hibbard 2018 One and the same has lost us, one and the same has forgotten us ~ Paul Celan Cover and title page art © Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett Book design by C. Mehrl Bennett & Tom Hibbard ISBN 978-1-938521-45-4 www.johnmbennett.net https://www.lulu.com/lunabisonteprods LUNA BISONTE PRODS 137 Leland Ave. Columbus, OH 43214 USA This collection of prose writings is respectfully dedicated to my cousin, Bill Dawes. TABLE OF CONTENTS Logos, Discourse, Daring, and the Geneology of the Visible (on Jim Leftwich, De Villo Sloan) ….……1 Writing on the Wall: Koppany, Hungary, and The Economy of Form………………………………………………9 Luc Fierens, Iconography and Flexibility, Is Mankind Burning…………………………………………..….…….…15 Reed Altemus, Planck and The Unblemished Logos of Transformation…………………………………...……19 Nico Vassilakis, Language as the Structure of Being…..…………………………………………………….……………21 David-Baptiste Chirot L’Amour Marxist, Presence in The Ontological Epoch…………………………………..25 Rain on Foreground-Background Street (on Guy Beining)………………………….………………………………….33 Difference, Diversity and The Infinite Trace.………………………………………………………………………………….37 Karl Kempton and “The Enigma of the Other”..………………………………………………………….………………….43 Visual Writing: Consciousness and Existence.…………………………………………………….………………………….51 Repetition and Variation: John M. Bennett, Quantum Difference & The Topographies of Meaning..57 The Land of Freedom: Michael Basinski’s HEKA……………………………………………………………..……………..67 Literature Nation, Maria Damon and Miekal And.……………………………………….…………………………………71 Freud and Visual Writing XTANT4……………………………………………………………….………………………………...79 Return of the Darkness: Vernon Frazer’s Avenue Noir.…………………………………………….…………………….83 Winter Imprint (on Wordsworth, Judith Goldman, and Jacques Derrida)……………………………………...87 Emile Nolde: Journey In Black.……………………………………………………………………………………………………….93 Visual Writing, Derrida and The Unreadable Being of The Dead Sea Scrolls……………………..……………97 Derek White and Wendy Collin Sorin: P.S. At Least We Died Trying……………………….…………………….105 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..………..109 Afterword by Jim Leftwich…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..111 LOGOS, DISCOURSE, DARING AND THE GENEALOGY OF THE VISIBLE: ATTEMPTING A STRAIGHTFORWARD INTRODUCTION “The physical world does not merely display arbitrary regularities; it is ordered in a very special manner.” - Paul Davies In Rethinking Globalism, Manfred Steger, in his introductory chapter writes, “Globalization researchers have increasingly turned toward historical issues, raising the particular question of whether globalization is primarily a modern phenomenon or a process that has unfolded for millennia.” As civilization begins a new millennium, it seems that consideration of these sorts of questions is worthwhile. What does the temporal vantage at this particular moment amidst the generations of humankind reveal to us, if anything, about the directions in which we are collectively traveling? What sorts of measurements, themes, finitudes, alterations are we able to detect? Examining the evolution of conceptualities and categories assesses the basic progress of various fields of study and especially revisions and advances in ways human beings think. Usually progress in specific fields of study parallels a general thematic progress in social patterns and philosophical understanding. Recently, certain influential writings have together demonstrated a sense of a new philosophical perspective under such headings as Postmodernism, Quantum Science, Relativity, Climate Change, Structuralism, Globalism. This perspective is found in such writings as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961, first published in a complete edition in English 2006), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (1961), Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life Vol. II (1961), Jean Baudrillard’s The Illusion of the End (first published in the U.S. 1992), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s anti-Oedipus (1972), Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970), Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) and many more. But this new perspective, loosely outlined, could also include such books as Loren Eiseley’s Unexpected Universe (1964), Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958) and environmental writings such as James Lovelock’s Gaia (1979), Vandana Shiva’s Earth Democracy (2005) and Thomas Berry’s The Great Work (1999). All of these writers and works more or less share the use of such memes as, from Deleuze, “rarified nature of…space,” “unusual movements,” “new dimensions,” “revolutionary thresholds.” And not only is each statement in this way inseparable from a multiplicity that is both “rare” and regular, but each statement is itself a multiplicity, not a structure or a system. (1) In the reviews in this collection, the intent is an examination of certain artworks in the light of what is considered basically Structuralist terminology. But in most of the discussions here, the real engine of new terminologies and “a new way of thinking” is the variety of unprecedented spinning 1 vantages and viewpoints from which our planet imposes a radically unfamiliar, disorienting set of parameters. No longer do we have simple clear-cut frames of reference of up and down, north and south, winter and summer, but, rather, we have gravitational and nongravitational, finite and infinite, invisible and visible, the same and the Other, the Self and the Other, linear and nonlinear, Classical and Structural (or Quantum). We have incomprehensible measurements of contra- dictory phenomena about which we are able only to speculate and extrapolate as, for now, we remain infinitely alone in incomplete worlds where we have no strictly rational way of proving their existence. Foucault’s historical approach, in which he focuses on the ways speculative ideas “open up” evolving knowledge toward advanced strategies and more effective methodologies of caring, is greatly illuminating. He shows the way in which abstract study and thought come to manifest themselves as innovative visibility or visibilities, buildings and organizations, needed and beneficial in serving society. Foucault portrays this absorbing type of development in separate texts concerning three different well-recognized sectors of society: medicine, mental health and sexuality. Foucault’s Semiotext(e) tract The Politics of Truth also makes use of the historical approach. One of the most interesting fields of study today, in which Structuralism most certainly is relevant, is the search for the origins of the universe—a subject Foucault does not broach but many others do. Also, the search for the origins and meaning of language is a parallel area of consideration, in which the application of Structuralist ideas provides insightful questions and answers. Emmanuel Levinas speaks of “this bond between expression and responsibility, this ethical condition” that is “the essence of language.” With Levinas, heterogeneity and multiplicity are the condition of existence. Invisibility and visibility remain connected. Only allowing the Other brings the Self into being. Deleuze, discussing Foucault, states much the same thing. “The subject who sees is himself a place within visibility.” In the same way Levinas connects “expression and responsibility,” Deleuze connects “the articulable and the visible.” Visibility is the ultimate achievement of the complex discourse of Structuralism and globalism. Present or past, the visible is like the articulable: they are the object not of a phenomenology but of an epistemology. (2) Visibilities are not defined by sight but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial examples, which emerge into the light of day. (3) Visual writing is not detachment from meaning, nor is it proof of the end of history. Rather, visual writing is an interrogation of “silence and response” as evidence of the relevance of the invisible and the imaginary. It is not an agenda but a means of perceiving a radically fundamental notion of reality. Visual writing is the result of a prolonged search for “presence” in an incomprehensible, infinite universe. Thus begins our study of the new art form of “visual writing.” 2 The Encoded Logos Around 1930, in England, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “Language is of interest to me as a phenomenon and not as a means to a particular end.” Although this is an early indication of the transformation language was undergoing at that time, others had done quite a bit of thinking on the subject somewhat earlier. In 1911, Ezra Pound, along with a new generation of artists, writers, musicians, sailed from U.S. shores to Europe to begin the journey of “modern poetry” and Modernism. With the idea of Imagism, Pound introduced into writing several important notions in terms of poetry that remain influential to this day, these notions being such things as vibrant factuality, no unnecessary words, fragmentation, artistic and historical types of composition and symbolic interactions and settings. The word “Imagism” first appeared in Pound’s introduction to his own book of poems, Riposts (1912). In Cathay (1915), ostensibly a collection of Chinese translations, Pound for all practical purposes introduced the idea of “objective correlatives.” This idea is captured in his brief 1913 poem In a Station of the Metro In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
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